Room 6_ LOTTO’S ROOM

Defined by Lotto himself as an “altarpiece of a St. Michael beating and driving out Lucifer” the painting depicts St. Michael the Archangel, wrapped in the glow of a cloud illuminated by divine light and in the apparent act of “driving out” Lucifer in an abyss of darkness (the struggle between the two is mentioned in Revelation 12:7, as well as in Isaiah 14:12,15, in Jude 6 and in 2 Corinthians 11:14). From the ephebic forms, the fallen, or rather, the “falling”, has nothing monstrous traits with which it was previously depicted and which will characterize it later. The Lottesco Lucifer is a true unicum. It shares traits of Michael’s features. And the skin is lucid, angelic, because it is still reached by the light. Even with his sword raised and intent on breaking the stick of the decadent nude, Michael seems to make an extreme gesture of charity: the offering of his left hand is as if to draw Lucifer to himself, as if to make of himself an instrument of salvation. Even the nudity, the twisted tail and the open hands in a gesture of extreme defense seem to indicate a destiny by now marked and chosen. There are clouds, leaves, bushes, and cliffs, apparently giving it a natural context, an exterior landscape. However, a perfect resemblance between the two figures and the symmetrically drawn gestures suggest the unfolding of a struggle and a charitable gesture in an interior place – an inner sky. In that cloud, which so much resembles a heart, there is the instant of choice, of freedom – either Light or darkness, good or evil. In the instant set by Lotto on this canvas, there is the indissoluble coexistence of good and evil inside the cloud-heart.

“A large picture with the sacrifice of the king and high priest Melchizedek when he went to meet Abraham as he was returning with the victories of his enemies”. This is what Lotto wrote on his Book of Various Expenses, on March 16, 1545. But he had already “seen” that scene in 1528, in Bergamo, while he was working on the cartoons for the inlays of the choir of Santa Maria Maggiore. There drew an ancient-style altar, with Hebrew inscriptions. Now the sacrificial table is made of wood, and covered with a white tablecloth, exactly as in the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, which is Lotto’s last work, where the shelf is empty, free, perhaps because it took place when the sacrifice was already consumed. Here the vegetation which is contained in the inlay is surprising and enchanting, even devastated in the proscenium, at most reduced to a background. Now it is luxuriant, enhanced in its fertility by the widespread presence of rabbits, and from the elephant paws, used as protomes to support the sacrificial table. As Genesis 14: 17-19 recounts, it is Melchizedek, the king of Salem, who goes to meet Abraham in the valley of Shaveh, after he had “defeated Chedor-Laomer and the kings who were with him”. On that table are the bread and wine, the anticipation of the Eucharistic sacrifice that the Messiah, the “eternal priest”, would have made; he who, as prophesied in Psalm 110, will present himself “in the manner of Melchizedek”. There are two processions: of Priests and of soldiers. It has the density of figures on the sides, as in Christ and the adulteress, and as in the Presentation in the Temple. One with distinctive, elegant and characterized faces, the other totally a shapeless and anonymous rabble, representing the soldier – winner and vanquished, without the possibility of distinction. There is Abraham offering “the tithe of all things”. Melchizedek and Lot, Abraham’s nephew, are the only ones  looking beyond those who are present, beyond nature, to the sky.

Nature and landscape never fully serene, never permanently dark. It is one of the last traits of Lotto. The gaze of the observer is called to immerse himself in a “cleardark” pictorial space. First of all, the skies are never clear. Glimpses of light are painted only to enhance compositions and embroideries of clouds, without a certain light source. Or even with several sources, as in this painting, where Jesus, caught in the act of bending down in the presence of John who baptizes him, is himself a light source: Christ - light. And just a little less luminous is the Baptist’s complexion. Above, to integrate glimpses of light in an ashy sky, is the white dove of the Holy Spirit; while on the right, in the half-light, are little secluded, shy, even little witnesses, two angels who attend Baptism. It is not clear whether they are from Lotto’s hand or otherwise (Camillo Bagazzotti?), but their faces are also located in a “clear-dark” space that is more moral than natural. That of the angel in the background, in particular, is a doubtful, tempted, perhaps tempting gaze. And thus juxtaposed, he and the other, the one with the face instead fully illuminated, seem to refer to tensions that are only apparently contrasting; just like in the figures of St. Michael and Lucifer in the other work in Loreto, there are the suspended figures of a single beating heart. A frequent exercise, in Lotto, is the constellation of tiny figures, yet alive, very lively, called to inhabit landscapes and distances. They are like the ones we see, on the banks of the three visible bends of the Jordan or immersed in its purifying waters, with a man from behind, placed at an intermediate distance, in the gesture of pointing to them, so that they do not go unnoticed.

Just like the Adoration of the Magi, this painting, which is usually referred to as the last (unfinished?) by Lotto, is not mentioned in the Book of Various Expenses and may have been made after the painter’s oblation to the Holy House (8 September 1554). A work that is questioned, to the point of disturbing, for its enigmatic features. It is a double pictorial space – one sacral and inhabited, in the foreground, the other an (almost) uninhabited raised choir. It is necessary to outline the background of the work, i.e., of the choir (of the Loreto basilica where Lotto’s works were to be placed?); it has barrel vaults with lunettes, and continuous wooden stalls can be distinguished along the curve of the exedra and a bench in the center decorated with back. On the sides of the room, there are two stairways to access it, with an elderly bearded man (Lotto?), on the top of the one on the right, caught on the threshold, in the act of entering the choir. The stairs on the left continue beyond the floor of the room to end in a women’s gallery where, as just hinted, three female figures can be distinguished. The altar, covered with a white tablecloth and resting on human feet, constitutes the center of the scene drawn by Lotto in the lower section of the painting. In the arms of Mary, Jesus is presented to Simeon in the Temple, as narrated by Luke. With a gesture of the hands that recalls that of Lotto’s Annunciata in Recanati, the priest seems to recall the ancient rite linked to the scapegoat, prescribed by Moses for the Day of Atonement. And if the Child Jesus, “light to enlighten the nations”, is destined to take upon himself the faults and sins of humanity, perhaps the mystery of those feet, called to support the table, is revealed. This is a deliberately anthropomorphic sacrificial macaw, because stands for Christ.

Despite that drape, of a green grain with many wavy folds, like a curtain hanging from the upper edge of the canvas and just pulled, vegetation, trees and a section of the luminous horizon are figures of a visual echo that refers to Lotto’s painted landscape composition of the Sacrifice of Melchizedek. A landscape also suspended here, like time: it is caught, it would seem, at dusk, perhaps at sunset, were it not for that light, that brightness that explodes in the center of the canvas, and rises vertically, from the white cloth on which Jesus is lying, through his body, through that of John, to the central angel. It is a family scene, of families, with Joseph and Zachariah, the most distant from children, caught throwing a glance on distracted men, instead of directing it towards Jesus (as happens in the previous version of the painting, which is located in the Louvre Museum, Paris). The only one, together with the three angels, who has her eyes turned towards the revealed God, is Mary. Painted by Lotto with an expressionless face, it is her open arms and hands that speak: they speak of amazement and welcome, as in Lotto’s Virgin Annunciata of Recanati, and of Jesi, rather than the apprehension for the sacrificial destiny of his son. The mother, moreover, does nothing else than correspond to the gesture of Jesus, reaching out, as it were, towards the small cross that John holds out to him. And under the white cloth, there is a second, red carmine, which Lotto had not dared to paint in the version that is now Parisian. It is the red of the blood of which the earth, all nature, will have to bathe, for the redemption of all. It will also be true, as someone has written, that this Loreto version, compared to the one in the Louvre, manifests itself as a less “extraordinary” work in execution. And yet there is an indisputable and perhaps more significant fact: the characters of the two works, compared to each other, are not different, significantly different. The difference is only in the figure of Jesus, the true unchangeable center.

As in the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, the other work created by Lotto in Loreto, probably in the very last months of his life, here too the presence of an apparently empty architectural space is essential. In the buildings designed behind the Holy Family it is impossible to decipher the interiors, because they lack of lighting. And the outer surface of their walls is also dark and bare, because, here as elsewhere, the light is sought and exalted by Lotto only where he wants to reveal human figures, their faces, the colors of their clothes. And this happens here for Mary, dressed in the same blue of the sky, for the Child, for the Magi. All characters, with Jesus at the head, as in other Lotto’s works, seem to take on shapes and colors by virtue of a light that is interior rather than coming from an external source. Far from being humble, the cottages, in addition to recalling Nordic models, delimit a conspicuous space of the scene. There is a space that in some way participates, its own way, to the gestures that the kings and the ghostly figures following them perform or are about to perform in the presence of the Child: the prostration of the first, with his kiss on the tiny foot of Jesus, which seems to suggest a self-representation of the Venetian painter, a fresco oblate of the Holy House; the somewhat awkward impetus of the second (perhaps taken in the form of the depositary and friend of Lotto from Bergamo, Agostino Filago) is ready to throw himself at the Child’s feet; the carelessness of the third, the black magician king who, still far from being able to cast his gaze towards Jesus, entertains himself with the men of his entourage. Leaving aside the uncertain, even approximate outlines and colors of the characters in this scene, if you go back with your eyes on the farmhouses, you are as if drawn inside, invited to breathe with your gaze with that interiority, not violated by light. There is the heart of Lotto in the form of an obscure architectural space just a moment before the total donation of himself to the Child, to the true King.

Elsewhere awaited, prefigured in the bread and wine, on the sacrificial altar, himself the altar of sacrifice, alredy central, now Christ possesses the form of man. The wait is complete. The time is up. There is no space in this painting except for a single nature, the human one. It is to that nature, which has so many faces here, that the man of the double nature, the man-God, turns. The instant is that of silence, of the silent Christ, while the rabble discusses, babbles, asks him about the law and morality. His are eyes that watch silently. Christ speaks and uses hand gestures; those hands therefore, not to point, tug, accuse, condemn, or stone. Having read the story of the evangelist John, Lotto has chosen here the instant that precedes the bending of the man-God, as well as his (mysterious) writing “with his finger on the ground”, and his lapidary words, dissolving any human presumption: “Who among you is without sin, cast the first stone” (John 8:7). His hands, his fingers not yet dirty with earth, speak the language which calmly, but firmly he stops the human arrogance and presumption (the right hand) and which with index and middle thumb, recalls the triune entity which alone belongs to moral judgment (the left hand). The only humanity that lays its eyes on Christ’s hands is that of the woman, the accused. Lotto was certainly not afraid to paint it in all its beauty, its elegance. There is whiteness and scent in that skin enhanced by the usual Lotto light, whose origin, even here, is more internal than external. The end of her long hair, gripped by the soldier’s rough hand, her head, slightly bent to the side, and her mouth, open just enough to make a grimace of pain, that of humiliation, are there to remind us, staring at her in an eternal instant, of the violence, even physical, of the man who claims the faculty of judging.

In the Book of Various Expenses the small painting is mentioned several times: for the first time in May 1549, in Venice, before leaving for Ancona, where the work appears on the list of Lotto’s works that went to the lottery of 1550. While taking into account the difference in size between the two works, the eyes that rest on this small canvas cannot avoid a comparison, in search of similarities and distances, with the other Lotto-fight painting, with Saint Michael chasing away Lucifer. Following that of a few previous years, the “picture” testifies to one of the last forays of the Venetian painter into the sky of pagan divinities. On the one hand, the unsuccessful goddess Fortuna (Tyche in Greek), is depicted, according to one of the most widespread variants in the Renaissance Age, as a young naked woman in forcibly precarious balance on a sphere and propelled by a sail, therefore subject to the changing direction of the wind. On the other hand, there is triumphant Fortress, that virtue whose attributes are firmness, symbolized by the column, and courage, portrayed by the lion heads that grip her shoes. It is true that the broken sail is reminiscent of the Luciferian staff. This is also the case with the naked flesh of Fortuna and those of the prince of the rebel angels. But here the cloud is a widespread threat, a darkness that covers the whole sky, not just a part of it. Though the two do not even touch each other in the battle between angels, Fortezza is instead ready, with the column in the hands, to strike the decisive blow on the goddess, after having already subdued her body with its own legs. There is no conciliation, no merciful gesture possible, no hand held out therefore, in a pagan context. Win or succumb. And yet the moment where Lotto stops is the one that precedes the final killing, the coup de grace that only firmness (the column) can deliver. Fortune is too beautiful, her volatility too attractive, to really believe (hope) in, or think of her definitive defeat.

The Book of Various Expenses is the autograph manuscript of Lorenzo Lotto. The original is preserved in the Historical Archive of the Holy House of Loreto.